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Tuesday, August 4, 2015

The Plot to Destroy Nixon

In his new biography “Being Nixon: A Man Divided,”
Evan Thomas concedes a point. Richard Nixon, he writes, “was not
paranoid; the press and the ‘Georgetown set’ really were out to get
him.”

Carl Bernstein’s review found Thomas’ book deficient in its failure
to chronicle the “endemic criminality” of the Nixon presidency.

Yet,
recent revelations suggest that “endemic criminality” is a phrase that
might well be applied to the newsroom of The Washington Post when Bob
Woodward and Bernstein worked there.

Consider. In “All the President’s Men,” Woodward and Bernstein admit
that, in collusion with Post editors and with the approval of Post
lawyers, they approached half a dozen Watergate grand jurors.
Admitting this was a “seedy venture,” they assured us no grand juror had violated his or her oath, and they got nothing.

Woodward and Bernstein deceived us about not breaching the grand jury.

They had. The source identified in their book as “Z,” a “woman … in a
position to have considerable knowledge of the secret activities of the
White House and CRP [Committee to Re-Elect the President]” was a grand
juror.

Notes of Bernstein’s conversation with this woman were found by
Himmelman in Bradlee’s files. Post editor Barry Sussman also told
Alan Pakula, who made the movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, that Carl had breached the grand jury.

What does this tell us?

Woodward and Bernstein lied for four decades in denying their success
in breaching the grand jury. And Bradlee knew they had been lying.

When Post lawyer E. B. Williams had his ex parte contact with old
friend Judge John Sirica, to put the fix in and get the judge not to
expose or punish Woodward and Bernstein, Williams almost surely knew the
reporters were lying.

In his memoir, Judge Sirica reveals what he would have done had Bernstein and Woodward gotten a grand juror to violate his oath:

“Had they actually obtained information from that grand juror, they would have gone to jail.”

Thus, Woodward and Bernstein, with the collusion of Post editors and
lawyers, got a grand juror to violate her oath and spill secrets. Then
Bradlee got E.B. Williams, godfather to Sirica’s daughter, to put the
fix in with that compliant judge, and all of them covered up the
conspiracy.

While pursuing Nixon, the “Georgetown set” was hiding the same sort
of mendacities and obstruction of justice that got Nixon’s men prison
time.

Nor does it stop there.

As we discovered, a decade ago, “Deep Throat,” whose moniker came from a dirty movie, was FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt.

In giving Woodward information from witness testimony to the grand
jury, Felt was violating his oath and engaged in criminal misconduct,
which, exposed, would have gotten him fired in disgrace and put in
prison, and Woodward implicated as the beneficiary of his crimes.

Woodward and Bernstein benefited mightily from the fruits of Felt’s
criminality, getting a Pulitzer for the Post, and having their careers
made by collusion with this corrupt civil servant and serial lawbreaker.

The subtitle of the new paperback of “All the President’s Men” is, “The Greatest Reporting Story of All Time.”

Excuse me, but how much reporting does it take to scribble down notes
from Mark Felt telling you who said what to the grand jury that day?

This is stenography, not reporting.

What was Felt’s motivation in leaking grand jury secrets to Woodward? Max Holland’s book “Leak” tells the story.

Felt sought to cast acting FBI Director Pat Gray, an honorable man,
as an incompetent who could not keep secrets. This would result in Gray
being passed over for permanent director. With the FBI top job open,
President Nixon would likely turn to — Deputy Director Mark Felt.

Lovely fellow, that Felt.

Of all the Watergate offenses of the Nixon White House, the “Huston
Plan” is often called the most terrifying. And what was the plan worked
up by my old friend Tom Charles Huston in 1970?

After Black Panthers began murdering cops and a Greenwich Village
bomb factory — where an anti-personnel bomb was being prepared to
massacre noncommissioned officers and their dates at a dance at Fort Dix
— blew up, Huston, with CIA, National Security Agency and Defense
Intelligence Agency backing, urged the reinstatement of FBI practices
used from FDR to LBJ.

These included warrantless wiretaps and surreptitious entries, “black-bag jobs,” to stem the epidemic of terror bombings.

Nixon OK’d the plan, but rescinded his approval five days later after J. Edgar Hoover’s objection.

And who had been in charge of FBI black-bag jobs in the LBJ era?

Mark Felt. Maybe when Woodward met Deep Throat in that garage, Felt was just casing the place.

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